<i> Ronald Reagan </i> The Movie

And Other Episodes in Political Demonology

Michael Rogin

Publication Year: 1988

The fear of the subversive has governed American politics, from the racial conflicts of the early republic to the Hollywood anti-Communism of Ronald Reagan. Political monsters—the Indian cannibal, the black rapist, the demon rum, the bomb-throwing anarchist, the many-tentacled Communist conspiracy, the agents of international terrorism—are familiar figures in the dream life that so often dominates American political consciousness. What are the meanings and sources of these demons? Why does the American political imagination conjure them up? Michael Rogin answers these questions by examining the American countersubversive tradition.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

The aim of this book is to name and characterize a countersubversive tradition
at the center of American politics. Although some of the chapters
were originally written to stand on their own and others were conceived
with the larger project in mind, all examine moments or strands in the
history of political demonology. ...

1. Ronald Reagan, the Movie

The year is 1940, Stalin and Hitler have signed their pact, and Europe
is at war. Saboteurs are operating inside America as well, blowing up
bridges and trains. The House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating
sabotage and sedition, subpoenas Joe Garvey, the chairman
of the Society of Loyal Naturalized Americans. ...

2. Political Repression in the United States

Most treatments of the countersubversive mentality, as we shall see in
chapter 9, disconnect demonology both from major American social
divisions and from institutionalized political repression. Most versions
of American history, by a complementary set of choices, chart a progress
toward freedom and inclusion. ...

"The king has in him two Bodies," wrote the Elizabethan jurist Edmund
Plowden, "viz, a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural . . .
is a Body mortal, subject to all infirmities that come by Nature or Accident.
But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled
. . . and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, ...

4. Nonpartisanship and the Group Interest

"Name the political scientist who has made the most important contributions
to the discipline since World War II," members of the American
Political Science Association were asked in 1962. David Truman was
among the six men most often mentioned.1 Truman's classic work of
"group theory," The Governmental Process,2 ...

5. Liberal Society and the Indian Question

Underneath the "ambitious expansionism" of modern western societies,
writes Henri Baudet in Paradise on Earth, "with their economic savoir
faire, their social ideology, and their organizational talents," lies "a psychological
disposition out of all political reality. It exists independently
of objective facts, which seem to have become irrelevant. ...

6. Nature as Politics and Nature as Romance in America

Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, organized in covenants as a
joint stock company, imagined themselves a mystic brotherhood reborn
in the body of Christ, American history has progressed under the sway
of two conflicting vocabularies. One, the language of exterior, marketplace
relations, takes the contract as its master symbol. ...

7. "The Sword Became a Flashing Vision": D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

"He achieved what no other known man has ever achieved," wrote
James Agee. "To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning
of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence,
coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art:
and to realize that this is all the work of one man." ...

8. Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies

The history of demonology in American politics comprises three major
moments. The first is racial, pitting whites against peoples of color and
placing race at the center of the most important divisions in American
political life. Class and ethnic conflict define the second demonological
moment. ...

9. American Political Demonology: A Retrospective

The countersubversive imagination is not a new subject in American
historiography. But efforts to comprehend the meaning of American political
demonology suffer from a split that echoes the splitting mechanism
in countersubversion itself, namely the bifurcation between the
symbol and the real. ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.